ACT Past Papers with Answers

Paper 18

ACT December 2020

Form D03 · Reading Test · 40 questions

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Paper 18 · ACT December 2020 · Form D03 · Reading Test

The point of view from which the passage is told is best described as that of a first person narrator who: only her own inner thoughts. sisters. thoughts of her mother, father, and sisters. else.

Arelates the actions of several characters but revealsBfocuses on interpreting the behavior of one of herCboth relates the actions of and shares the innerDretells a story that has been told to her by someone

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Paper 18 · ACT December 2020 · Form D03 · Reading Test

According to the passage, it’s uncommon for the narra- tor’s family to be: Passage II SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is from the article “The Awful Reign of the Red Delicious” by Sarah Yager. In the 1870s, Jesse Hiatt, an Iowa farmer, discov- ered a mutant seedling in his orchard of Yellow Bell- flower apple trees. He chopped it down, but the next season, it sprang back through the dirt. He chopped it down again. It sprang back again. “If thee must grow,” he told the intrepid sprout, “thee may.” A decade later, Hiatt’s tree bore its first fruit. The apples were elongated globes with red-and-gold striped skin, crisp flesh, and a five-pointed calyx. In 1893, when Stark Brothers’ Nursery of Louisiana, Missouri, held a contest to find a replacement for the Ben Davis—then the most widely planted apple in the coun- try, strapping and good-looking but bland—Hiatt sub- mitted his new variety, which he called the Hawkeye. “My, that’s delicious,” Clarence Stark, the company’s president, reportedly said after his first bite. But not for the first time in apple lore, one sweet taste precipitated a fall. Stark Brothers’ soon secured the rights to the Hawkeye, changed its name to the Stark Delicious (only after the branding of the Golden Delicious, in 1914, did it become the Red Delicious), and began an ambitious marketing campaign. Over the next two decades, the nursery spent $750,000 to pro- mote the new apple, dispatching traveling salesmen to farms across the country and exhibiting the Delicious at the 1904 World’s Fair. After the completion of the Great Northern Railway, Clarence Stark sent trainloads of seedlings to newly established orchards in the Columbia River Valley, their leaves trembling as the engines rumbled West. With its hardy rootstocks and juicy, curvaceous fruit, the Red Delicious quickly became a favorite of growers and consumers from coast to coast—and as its commercial success grew, so did its distance from Hiatt’s Hawkeye. In 1923, a New Jersey orchardist wrote to the Starks to report that one limb of a tree he had purchased from the nursery was producing crimson apples while those on the other limbs remained green. A chance genetic mutation that made the apples redden earlier had also given them a deeper, more uniform color, and customers were lining up for a taste. Paul Stark, one of Clarence’s sons, travelled up from Mis- souri and laid down $6,000 for the limb. News of the deal spread, and soon The Gettysburg Times reported that more than 500 horticulturalists from 30 states had gathered at the orchard to discuss the “freak bud” that produced “the marvel apple of the age.” Their meeting marked the beginning of an era of fruit improvement, as growers began to seek out and cultivate similar mutations. By the 1940s, the Red Delicious had become the country’s most popular apple, with the broad shoulders and lipstick shine of a Golden Age Hollywood star. The cosmetic changes were a boon for industrial agricultur- alists: Apples that turned rosy before they were fully ripe could be picked earlier and stored longer, and skins with more red pigment tended to be thicker, which extended shelf life and hid bruises. But as genes for beauty were favored over those for taste, the skins grew tough and bitter around mushy, sugar-soaked flesh. Still, by the 1980s, the Red Delicious made up 75 per- cent of the crop produced in Washington. By the time selective breeding had taken its toll, according to apple expert Tom Burford, a few big nurseries controlled the market, planting decisions were made from the remove of boardrooms, and consumers didn’t have many vari- eties to choose from. The Red Delicious became “the largest compost-maker in the country,” he said, as shop- pers routinely bought the apples and threw them away. Then in the 1990s, new varieties that American growers had originally developed for overseas markets began to edge into the domestic market. Shoppers had been “eating with their eyes and not their mouths,” Burford said. And now their taste buds had been awak- ened. A sudden shift in consumer preferences, paired with growing competition from orchards in China, took the industry by surprise. Between 1997 and 2000, U.S. apple growers lost nearly $800 million in surplus crop. They had “made the apples redder and redder, and pret- tier and prettier, and they just about bred themselves out of existence,” a marketing director for one North- western fruit company told The New York Times. Since then, Red Delicious production has declined by 40 percent. While the apple is still by far the most common in the U.S.—growers produced 54 million bushels of Red Delicious in 2011, compared to just 33 million bushels of its closest competitor, the Gala— the industry is adjusting to a changing market. © 2014 The Atlantic Media Co., as first published in The Atlantic Maga- zine. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Aaway from the narrator’s father’s parents.Btraveling by car instead of by train.Ctaking a long vacation together.Dprepared for an outing.

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Paper 18 · ACT December 2020 · Form D03 · Reading Test

In the context of the passage, the information between the dashes in lines 85–87 mainly serves to: 2011. with the increase in Gala production. by the Red Delicious. 33 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. ACT-D03 3 3 Passage III HUMANITIES: This passage is from the article “Photography Changes the Movies We Choose to See” by Preminda Jacob. For nearly five decades, huge photo-realistic bill- boards of film stars towered over the streets of Chennai, a major hub of the vibrant and prolific Indian film industry. Expertly hand-painted on canvas banners and plywood cutouts, these eye-catching advertisements extracted dreamlike images of wealth, beauty, and revenge from films screened in darkened and air- conditioned theaters and displayed them in the sunlit glare of urban thoroughfares. The selection of these photographic stills, plucked from films and enlarged to architectural proportions (one hundred feet in length for banners and forty feet in height for cutouts) was calculated to excite the public and nourish a “spectatorial consciousness,” what Roland Barthes, a French cultural critic who often wrote about photography, described as the experiential quality of still photographic images. Barthes recalled being transfixed by still images from movies, but then losing all memory of them while viewing the film they came from. Our perception of a moving cinematic image, he explained, is always determined by the frames that both precede and follow it. In contrast, a single and isolated film still that stands alone can be viewed indefinitely and more carefully. While the artists who crafted Chennai’s cinematic billboards were probably unaware of Barthes’ theories, interviews I conducted with them reminded me how aware they were of distinctions between still and moving images. I recall one anecdote in particular. Mr. Vedachellam—a billboard artist and entrepreneur— explained to me that his film-industry clientele rou- tinely attempted to circumvent censorship by protesting to the authorities that the provocative still photographs featured on billboards were simply taken from film footage already cleared by the censors. The police com- missioner’s canny rejoinder to the publicity agents’ appeals, Mr. Vedachellam recalled, was to remind them that these questionable stills appeared on the cinema screen for only a few seconds so viewers would soon forget them, or may not even have quite “seen” them at all. Freezing and enlarging such images, he argued, was a different matter altogether. And displaying them prominently on major thoroughfares would likely result in costly traffic jams and additional accidents. The police routinely censored these images by pasting pieces of white paper over offending portions of the billboards. In his work, Barthes made another, different point about distinctions between photographic and painted images. A photograph, he claimed, is indexical—it has a direct and detailed correspondence to the subject, whereas in a drawn or painted image, each mark or brushstroke potentially takes on more symbolic value. So, what happens when the conventions of three media coalesce? A photograph of Mr. Vedachellam at work records a complex nexus of photography, painting, and the cinema. Each medium mimics some of the charac- teristics of the two others. Vedachellam’s painting style is photorealistic; he copies a photograph that is, itself, a composite of film stills. And these film stills reflect the influence of the melodramatic look of nineteenth- century European tableaux painting on the sets, cos- tumes, and lighting of the first full-length feature films produced both in Hollywood and in India. The hybridization of these media dates back to the work of India’s earliest photographers. From the 1850s to the present, local entrepreneurs operating photo stu- dios have employed painters to enhance portrait pho- tographs of their clients with drama and desirable accoutrements that were absent in the original pho- tographs. The theatricality of Indian studio photo- graphs, and the fantasies they fulfill, has in turn influenced the idealized ways celebrities are repre- sented in the hand-painted cinema advertisements. Like their counterparts in the world of studio photography, banner artists also painted directly onto a photograph in the process of creating studies for their spectacular enlargements. Using black-and-white poster paints, they first painstakingly outlined every detail in the pho- tograph. Next, a photographic negative of the outlined image was projected onto the canvas or plywood sur- face and a tracing was made. At every stage in the process artists grasped a film still in one hand while wielding a paintbrush with the other hand. This method of transferring photographic stills onto canvas encouraged artists to further manipulate and idealize images of their celebrity subjects. From the article “Photography Changes the Movies We Choose to See” by Preminda Jacob (©2012 by Preminda Jacob). Used with permission.

Ashow that Red Delicious production stabilized inBcontrast the decline in Red Delicious productionCspecify the size of the US apple harvest.Dillustrate the continued domination of the market

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Paper 18 · ACT December 2020 · Form D03 · Reading Test

Based on details in the fifth paragraph (lines 65–84), it can reasonably be inferred that one reason billboard artists enhanced or manipulated images from films was to: 35 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. ACT-D03 3 3 36 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. ACT-D03 3 3 Passage IV NATURAL SCIENCE: Passage A is from the book Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures by Virginia Morell. Passage B is from the essay “Big Love: The Emotional Lives of Elephants” by Carl Safina. Passage A by Virginia Morell One of the more striking discoveries in neuro- science in recent years is the finding that elephants, whales, great apes, and humans all possess a peculiar kind of brain cell. These neurons were first discovered in human brains in the nineteenth century and were named von Economo cells after the Romanian anatomist Constantin von Economo, who identified them. At first, these spindle-shaped neurons were touted as the cells that “make us human,” because they’re connected to our feelings of empathy, love, emotional suffering, and sociality. Then, in 1999, two other researchers, Patrick Hof and John Allman, spotted von Economo cells in the brains of all the great apes; others recently found them in monkeys. Allman has searched without luck for the cells in more than a hun- dred other species, from sloths to platypuses. So it was big news when, in 2007, he discovered spindle cells in the brains of whales, dolphins, and elephants. But it was a puzzling discovery, too. Why should such a dis- parate group of animals have these specialized cells? From an evolutionary point of view, it’s not sur- prising that primates and humans have von Economo cells, since we are in the same lineage. But primates and humans haven’t shared an ancestor with whales or elephants since about the beginning of the mammalian lineage, some sixty million years ago. It seems that cetaceans and elephants evolved their spindle cells independently. What factors would produce such emo- tionally specialized brain cells? Allman thinks part of the answer lies in the size of the animals’ brains—most species that have spindle cells also have notably large brains—and in the location of the cells. Von Economo cells are always found in two regions of the cortex associated with emotionally charged, visceral judgments, such as deciding whether a fellow animal is suffering. And part of the answer lies in the size of the spindle cells. They are unusually large, enabling them to act like high-speed circuits, fast-tracking information to and from other parts of the brain, while bypassing unnecessary connections. These are the kind of cells, Allman argues, that would be especially useful to an animal living in a complex soci- ety—a society in which making accurate, intuitive deci- sions about another’s actions (or facial or vocal expressions) is crucial for your family’s and your survival. Passage B by Carl Safina Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human motivation, char- acteristics, or behavior to animals, inanimate objects, or nat- ural phenomena. In establishing the study of animal behavior as a science, it had originally been helpful to make anthro- pomorphism a word that raised a red flag. But as lesser intellects followed the Nobel Prize–winning pioneers, anthropomorphism became a pirate flag. If the word was hoisted, an attack was imminent. You wouldn’t get your work published. And in the academic realm of publish or perish, jobs were at stake. Even the most informed, insightful, logical inferences about other ani- mals’ motivations, emotions, and awareness could wreck your professional prospects. But what is a “human” emotion? When someone says you can’t attribute human emotions to animals, they forget the key leveling detail: humans are animals. Human sensations are animal sensations. Inherited sen- sations, using inherited nervous systems. All of the emotions we know of just happen to be emotions that humans feel. So, simply deciding that other animals can’t have any emotions that humans feel is a cheap way to get a monopoly on all of the world’s feelings and motivation. People who’ve systematically watched or known animals realize the absurdity of this. But many others still don’t. “The dilemma remains,” wrote author Caitrin Nicol recently, “how to get an accurate understanding of the animals’ nature and (if appropriate) emotions, without imposing on them assumptions born of a distinctly human understanding of the world.” But tell me, what “distinctly human understand- ing” hampers our understanding of other animals’ emo- tions? Is it our sense of pleasure, pain, hunger, frustration, self-preservation, defense, parental protec- tion? We never seem to doubt that an animal acting hungry feels hungry. What reason is there to disbelieve that an elephant who seems happy is happy? We can’t really claim scientific objectivity when we recognize hunger and thirst when animals are eating and drinking, exhaustion when they tire, but deny them joy and hap- piness as they’re playing with their children and their families. Yet the science of animal behavior has long operated with that bias—and that’s unscientific. In sci- ence, the simplest interpretation of evidence is often the best. Passage A: Excerpt(s) from ANIMAL WISE: THE THOUGHTS AND EMOTIONS OF OUR FELLOW CREATURES by Virginia Morell, copy- right © 2013 by Virginia Morell. Used by permission of Crown Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Passage B: ©2015 by Carl Safina. Used by permission of Carl Safina in care of the Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency, Inc. (permissions@jvnla.com)

Ajustify the cost of theater tickets.Bfulfill viewers’ fantasies.Cprotest film censorship.Dsupport the local art scene.

Form D03 · Reading Test · 40 questions

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